Photographs, diaries, snapshots

I was talking with my friend Neil the other day. He said he was shooting after a funeral, in order to have some sort of memory of the even happening at all, and that people were most surprised of this. Somehow, the function of photographs to be reminders of events seems to be fading, slightly... it doesn't come up as the first thing in most people's minds when asking why do they take pictures. Everything goes faster. The diaries are uploaded on facebook and they are massive collections of snapshots, compared to those big books we used to have before, which due to sheer size had to be somehow edited down (and on which the events would be written down). Also, I have the feeling that the photographer himself is more self aware nowadays when shooting. If you check flickr, you'll see that lots of people that shoot daily life diaries have either an explicit or implicit artistic presumption. The thing photographed has to produce an artistic result that is greater than the thing photographed. Back in the day, when you took holiday photographs, the circle of people you shared them with was small. This lead to some unpretentious gems. Maybe the attitude to photography (by photographers) will not bring these back.

I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I had not been sailing through 70's and 80's snapshots in flickr. Rarely anybody takes photographs like these anymore. Some work amazingly well. The photographer is slightly on the shade, and the subject is well delivered through a rich composition. Some of my favourites come from the archives of Harald Hauesler:









These are from 1962 Familie Kramer.

Boredom, photographs, paintings, art

I remember when in primary I saw for the first time Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...





We had just got out of impressionism, and hitting abstraction, cubism and futurism. On Duchamp's painting I stopped and said, damn, I see it! Well, it's not as if you couldn't see all the stuff, but most of it was fairly obscure (like music for musicians we do have art for artists, I'd say). But, hey, here you could stop for a moment and actually think that that is, in a sketchy way, what a person looks over time when they walk down a staircase. Everything superimposed. Seeing this so many years later took me to reading the wikipedia entry, and it has this interesting bit...

In the composition, Duchamp depicted motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. The painting shows elements of both the Cubist and Futurist styles. Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey.

Well, the influence of that was recognized looks like this:



- Man walking down an inclined plane


- Horse walking


- Pelican landing


That makes Duchamp look a lot easier actually. And it somehow brings me full circle to photography and Trenk Parke...

Boredom, paintings, art

Hah, plenty of people seem to be bored of conteporary photography out here. Not very surprised. People have always been bored of contemporary photography at least since the beginning of last century. I'm bored as well. Maybe it's time to bring in that old clash that photography shouldn't try to imitate paintings. Too much painterly stuff out there, when the interesting thing are all those images that you collect with a camera through a viewfinder and you wouldn't conceive on your own or through your eyes.

This reminds me. When I look at this Bruegel painting I can't help but to think...





... that the framing is sort of not perfect. There are chopped trees at both sides and even the people are in a slightly non-optimal position and they are slightly cropped also at the bottom. There are multitude of small scenes and actions going on, just like in daily life. I just guess that the framing and choice of the scene is for enhanced realism.

If we now compare with a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson depicting a similar snowy and populated scene...





... well, somehow the composition tries to imitate paintings and it's more clean than Bruegel's. Just because it being a photograph brings the realism that the painter tried to achieve? So painters imitated life, and photographers imitated painters? Aren't we missing something here?

Elsewhere: art and artlessness

I just read this entry in the B blog (what's with all these letters?). I quite much enjoyed this bit when Blake writes about a group snapshot taken 21 years ago in the small village he is from:

"This particular photo seems to support that idea that the more "artful" a photographer attempts to be --the more referential and self-conscious-- the more quickly it is forgotten, while photographers who record reality in less stylized documentary way eventually gain recognition. Some of the greatest photographers of all time --Watkins, Jackson, Atget, Disfarmer, etc-- didn't think of themselves as artists so much as documentary recorders. The recognition as art came later, as artlessness became arty."

The picture he talks about is actually quite cute. It would be nice to see two dozens on the same line by now... but who knows where they're buried. I guess that with the ability of people to delete the crap from their digital cameras, thousands of potential future artworks are lost every week. Will we never see the proof of people picking their noses in school pictures again? Damn.

Bedtime, I managed to arrange greasy breakfast for tomorrow.